A Young Doctor Fights The Depression Epidemic In Palestine

Forty percent of Palestinians are clinically depressed, a rate unmatched anywhere in the world. It’s more than triple that of the U.S., ten times higher than in the U.K., and four to eight times higher than in Scandinavia, where the sun doesn’t shine for a good part of the year. For Palestinian neuroscientist Mohammad Herzallah, this epidemic is an opportunity, if a tragic one, because it has made his country an ideal place to do groundbreaking research into the effects of depression on the brain.

Dr. Mohammad Herzallah of the Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative

I caught up with the 27-year-old doctor at the TED Conference in Long Beach, Calif. this week. Herzallah grew up in Palestine and got his medical degree at Al-Quds University in the West Bank, just a 15-minute walk from Jerusalem but a two-hour drive once through the checkpoints. Currently a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University in Newark, Herzallah was awarded a coveted TED Fellowship this year for his efforts to set up the first infrastructure for neuroscience research in one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. His Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative opened its lab three and a half years ago at Al-Quds and now has 22 students, 14 medical specialists and four therapists. It has established partnerships with medical centers at Rutgers, Harvard, the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland and SISSA in Trieste, Italy.

“It’s a tragic fact but Palestine is an ideal place for depression research because of its young population, for whom the impact is much worse than on old people, and genetic homogeneity, which allows us to isolate other factors. These people have been living here continuously for a hundred thousand years,” says Herzallah. “Let’s turn the problem into an advantage and train the next generation to deal with it.”

The Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative has already submitted eight research papers, half of which have been published and half are still under academic review. It received a $300,000 award last year from the U.S. National Institutes of Health for a project to study how major depressive disorder affects learning and memory.

Some of its work on this front has explored new ground. In a paper published in 2010 in Cognitive Behavioral Neurology, Herzallah’s team found that Prozac-style antidepressants can impair a depressed patient’s ability to generalize rules of learning, even though the drugs are supposed to grow the number of hippocampus cells in the brain that are essential to learning. For example, if you tell a clinically depressed person taking Prozac that both Jane and Paul like to order seafood, they’re less likely to transfer that learning to conclude that if Jane orders shrimp for dinner, Paul will likely be ordering shrimp, too.

What fascinates Herzallah these days is what factors have allowed the 60% of the population to avoid the effects by depression. “Depression is a factor of both genetics and stress. Everyone who has the genetic predisposition to get depression will get it under a stressful environment,” he says. And Palestine certainly is that, with a crumbling economy, rampant unemployment and constant tension with Israel. “We’re going to study the genetic differences between the 60% and the 40% and see how the disorder affects their overall cognitive function.”

Research aside, Herzallah’s bigger aim is to fight Palestine’s brain drain and create opportunities for other doctors to open up their own labs and clinics. “People here are always so focused on the politics but we’ve had no success since 1948. I say let’s fix something else. People should feel inner peace first before investing in something else.”